Читать книгу Finance & Grow Your New Business - Angie Mohr - Страница 36

So you’ve decided to jump into the role of entrepreneur. You have fantastic vision and insight and are looking forward to managing and growing your business for a long time to come. Have you thought about what happens then? Do you still plan on coming into the office every day at 9 a.m. when you’re 60? 70? How about 90? Most likely, you have at least a vague concept of what you want to do when you’re older. You may even have decided that you want to make enough money in your business to retire when you’re 40 or 50.

Analyzing your retirement goals involves more than just vague concepts. It is the basis for your business and personal financial plans. If you’re planning that your business will provide you a steady income for your working life and then a small gain on sale when you sell, you need to ensure that these funds will be sufficient to meet your financial needs when you retire, otherwise, you’ll need to keep working longer than you had anticipated.

The minimum financial goal for your retirement is to be financially independent. Financial independence means that you will be able to live off your financial capital for the rest of your life without working, if you wish.

Let’s look at an example to illustrate how this works. We will walk through a simple example, which will exclude some complexities that exist in real life, like the impact of taxes and income from other sources such as pensions. When you are making your retirement calculations, I highly recommend that you do so with the assistance of your accountant or independent financial adviser (by independent, I mean someone who doesn’t make commissions from the products he or she sells you).

Start by getting a handle on how much income you need per year to live on after you have retired. Keep in mind that you will have (hopefully!) no debt or mortgage payment and that your assets will be owned free and clear. You will simply have your ongoing living expenses (e.g., property taxes, utilities, food, clothing, medical) and any money that you need to carry out your retirement dreams, such as travel costs. Your post-retirement income needs are likely to be much lower than your current ones. Let’s say that you have decided that you want to have $50,000 per year to live on when you retire. You are 35 right now and plan on retiring when you are 60. Therefore you have 25 years to save for your retirement. You want to make sure that you are being conservative and plan to live until you are 90 years old, so you will need the $50,000 per year for 30 years. You have life insurance and therefore have no need to have any cash left at death. There are two questions that need to be answered mathematically:

• How much will you need to have saved by the time you are 60 in order to meet your income requirements? and

• How much will you have to put into your retirement fund each year between now and age 60 to have that amount available?

We will use a 6 percent average return for our calculations.